The Mask of Sanity

by Hervey Cleckley

  About ten days later he was pardoned outright by the governor and almost immediately took legal action which got him discharged against medical advice. Many similar adventures had occupied his time prior to the recent admission. Some of these had resulted in his being sent, as in the episode just cited, to psychiatric hospitals from which he promptly obtained his release by legal action. Others had led him to jail and to the police barracks dozens of times for charges not sufficiently serious for him to utilize the expedient of psychiatric hospitalization as a means of escape.

  A series of troubles had led to his reaching the hospital on this last occasion. As mentioned previously, he had many years ago divorced his first wife and remarried. The second legal spouse continued to play an important part in his career. As the proprietress or madame of a local brothel generally conceded to be the most orderly and, perhaps in a limited sense, the most respectable institution of its sort in the city, she was constantly embarrassed by the actions of her husband. Though enjoying a good part of the revenue from this ever-lucrative business, Max troubled himself little to maintain the dignity of the house.

  In fact, it seemed that he went out of his way to complicate matters for his wife. If not through his daily and nightly brawls or uproars in various low grogshops, dancehalls, or “juke joints,” then by putting slugs into slot machines or serving as fence in some petty thieving racket, he brought the police in search of him down on the “house of joy” which maintained him.

  Though satisfactory understandings were said to exist between this institution and the law, policemen suddenly appearing at the door and trooping through the hallways proved anything but conducive to that sense of security and dignity Mrs. _____ had long and justly boasted for her house.

  Especially after a few drinks, Max also liked to go about the house bragging to clients and to entertainers alike of his prowess in various lines, intruding on parties still at the “downstairs stage” of the night’s activities, minding everybody’s business, and inevitably turning the conversation to his superiorities. Most of the time he was quite amiable in this role—a cordial, but an all too cordial, host under circumstances in which people are usually concerned more with definite and perhaps pressing aims of their own than with the glowing reminiscences of another. Occasionally when crossed, he became threatening even with clients and, though open strife was usually avoided, hot, wild words and strenuous scenes sometimes followed, with Max exulting in the aftermath by pacing up and down the corridors of the house, shadowboxing, cursing, crying out his pugilistic titles and victories, and challenging all comers.

  No one realized better than his wife, a woman of experience and good judgment in such matters, what an unhappy effect these antics had on her clientele quietly seeking pleasure behind doors before which Max roared and paraded. Naturally she sought to silence him and to lead him off to the quarters they shared. Usually, however, her appearance served merely as a focus for his ire, and the tumult she sought to quell redoubled through her efforts. More than once under such circumstances he pursued her into her room, the wrangle having moved on to open violence, and there beat her to his heart’s content. Mrs. _____, a tall and heavy person, gave a casual impression of being twice as large as Max. Furthermore, she was a woman of considerable strength. She often fought back vigorously and, though she seldom succeeded in landing a telling blow that would discourage her marital opponent, her resistance made the fight much more lively and greatly augmented the uproar of thuds, slaps, crashes, oaths, grunts, and honest yells of pain.

  Over several years this connubial life had been interrupted frequently by Max’s departure, which he usually took in heat after quarrels such as those just described. Often he left voluntarily with obscene curses at his wife on his lips. Sometimes she called the police after he had covered her with minor bruises and abrasions from his practiced fists and had him forcibly ousted. Over the years he spent perhaps two-thirds of his time away, going from city to city and living by his wits, which are sharp indeed. When caught in his minor frauds, which he practiced not only on the public but also on those associated with him in his ventures, he quickly left town. Or, if retreat was not quick enough, he spent a few days in jail, from which he soon obtained release by telling of his imaginary head injury, of his “spells,” or of anything else that occurred to his fertile mind as a means to make people believe he was incompetent because of “shell shock.” When his situation turned out to be more serious, he telegraphed or telephoned to his wife, who at once flew to his aid, usually with some little money at her disposal.

  He covered the entire eastern seaboard on these trips and made several expeditions into the Midwest. For a few weeks in Texas he lived well off of money he milked from slot machines by some ingenious device or contraption or maneuver. His inventions of this type are numerous and highly practical. He could, perhaps, make an excellent living indefinitely off such takings if he did not, when drinking, and often when sober, boast too widely of his cleverness or otherwise bring himself to the attention of the police.

  It has been mentioned that earlier in his career, but after his second marriage, he had been wedded to other women bigamously. His wife learned of these episodes and legal action was taken by the deceived women.

  From these minor troubles he was extricated by his shrewdness, the aid of his wife, and the power of his familiar tactics of claiming incompetency and irresponsibility. This gambit of moves seems to have gained rather than lost effectiveness by repetition. It has become virtually a joker in the deck, or rather up the sleeve, and it has never failed him yet. One cannot but wonder if the juries, the courts, and other authorities are not overwhelmed by precedent and, seeing that his grounds for impunity have been upheld so often in the past, fail to challenge them adequately. Precedent is, of course, freely admitted to weigh heavily in law. On the other hand, these nonmedical observers seem to weigh seriously the plain facts of the patient’s conduct when they decide that he is not a normal man, whatever term psychiatrists may use to designate him.

  The immediate cause of Max’s return to the hospital on this occasion was indirectly connected with a third bigamous marriage which he recently made while off on one of his tours from connubial security. With his new partner he tried his hand again at forgery on a somewhat larger scale than usual. He prospered for a while and, flushed with prosperity and bravado, brought his new bigamous partner home with him on a visit to the brothel where his legal wife was struggling to restore standards which had suffered during his presence.

  As might well be imagined, quarreling broke out at once between the two wives. Max, still in character, did nothing to pour oil on these sorely troubled waters. In fact, his every move seemed designed to whip up the already lively doings to a crescendo. The dispute culminated in a vigorous and vociferous set-to during which both ladies were pretty thoroughly mauled, furniture was broken, and the brothel all but wrecked. Max’s most important personal contribution to the fray was a broken jaw for his legal wife, the madame of the house.

  It is interesting here to note that, despite his continual brawling with both men and women over so many years while drinking or while quite sober and despite his ferocious threats of violence and his pretty genuine ability as a pugilist, no serious bodily harm had before this come to anyone at his hands. I believe that the substantial injury was unintentional, an act of thoughtless exuberance committed in the heat of a situation eminently and subtly designed to bring out high enthusiasm in such a man as our hero.

  Having succeeded in bringing off a scene that even in his career stands out as a little masterpiece, he took the bigamous partner and fled back to the nearby city where his forgeries were in progress. Almost on his arrival detection met him, and hard on its heels came prosecution from home in consequence of the jaw breaking. To these difficulties charges for his latest bigamy were added. As such disasters began to accumulate about Max, his legal wife, finally aroused, decided for the moment to lend her influence to the punitive forces.<
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  In the court action that followed, the present and third bigamous wife received an adequate sentence to the state penitentiary, and for a while Max’s own fortune seemed none too bright. Wrought upon by his protestations, however, and perhaps influenced as well by the disappearance of her rival from the scene, his old protector, the legal wife, was won over and began to work with her husband. Soon matters were arranged for him to escape the ordinary consequences of his deeds and be sent again to a psychiatric hospital. His last admission, with which this account began, was the result.

  Safe in the familiar harbor of a psychiatric hospital, he was for a week or more friendly, cooperative, and apparently content. He was at all times shrewd, somewhat witty on low levels of humor, and entirely free from ideas or behavior suggesting any recognized psychosis.

  He became very friendly with me during this period and talked entertainingly and with enthusiasm about his many adventures. He denied all misconduct on his part but admitted that he had often been in trouble because of his wife and others. It was not the denial of a man who is eager to show himself innocent but the casual tossing aside of matters considered irrelevant or bothersome to discuss. After briefly laughing off all his accusations, he at once shifted the subject to his many triumphs and attainments.

  Telling of his early life in Vienna, his birthplace, he spoke of his excellent scholarship in the schools, of his preeminence at sports, and of the splendid figure in general he had cut as a youth in that gay and urbane city. In none of these statements did he lay in details such as might be expected of a man developing a delusional trend. No psychiatrist, and few laymen for that matter, would have had the least difficulty in recognizing all this as “tall talk” designed to deceive the listener and to put the talker in a good light. All the patient’s reactions showed that he himself was far from being taken in.

  His birth and upbringing in Vienna coincide with the facts as obtained from his army records. His alleged experiences at Heidelberg are recorded many times on his own testimony. He described himself as a distinguished student in that honorable university, referring to Kant and Schopenhauer and several of the Greek philosophers as special subjects of his study. He spoke also of a deep interest in Shakespeare during his student days and sought to give the idea that he was celebrated among his fellows for his knowledge of the Bard.

  The shrewdness and agility of his mind were prettily demonstrated in these references to the picturesque and traditional gaieties of student life, and to the works of the philosophers and poets. No less vividly and convincingly did he reveal an utter lack of real acquaintance with any of the subjects in which he boasted himself learned.

  He knew the names of a half-dozen Shakespearean plays, several catchpenny lines familiar to the man on the streets, a scattering of great names among the philosophers. He was totally ignorant not only of the systems of thought for which his philosophers are famous but also even of superficial and general facts about their lives and times that any person, however unintellectual, could not fail to remember if he ever had the interest to read of such matters. Of Shakespeare he knew practically nothing beyond the titles that rolled eloquently from his tongue and a few vague and jumbled conceptions that have crept into the ideologies of bootblacks, peasants, and street gamins the world over. Furthermore, he had no interest, as contrasted with knowledge, in any matter that could be called philosophic or poetic. He liked to rattle off his little round of fragmentary quotations, the connections and the connotations of which he realized only in the most superficial sense, to contribute a few pat and shallow saws of his own believed by him to be highly original, iconoclastic, and profound, to boast generally of his wisdom, and then to go on to descriptions of his other attainments and experiences.

  To my surprise, he was several times taken by psychiatrists who studied him briefly and by social service workers as a man of some intellectual stature. His story of study at Heidelberg, though usually discounted, was, if the implication of the psychiatric histories is correctly read, sometimes taken as true or probably true.

  Although my actual contact with Heidelberg is superficial enough, I had no difficulty in demonstrating in the patient a plain lack of acquaintance with the ways of life there. The general plan of study and the physical setup of the university, matters that would be familiar to anyone who had been an undergraduate there, however briefly and disinterestedly, were unknown to Max. He showed that he might have passed through the town and that he had heard and still clearly remembered gossip and legend from the streets of Vienna about the university and its customs, but he had no more real understanding of it than a shrewd but unlettered cockney would have of Cambridge.

  This phase of his examination provided, in my opinion, a striking example of the ambiguity inherent in our world intelligence. Here was a man of exceptional acumen. His versatile devices of defraud, his mechanical inventions to overcome safeguards which ordinarily protect slot machines, and other depositories of cash, and his shrewd practical reasoning in the many difficulties of his career demonstrate beyond question the accuracy, quickness, and subtlety of his practical thinking. His memory is unusually sound; his cleverness at manipulating bits of information so as to appear learned is exceptional. He is not a man to be taken in by the scheming of others, though he himself takes in many. One can truthfully say about him that he is “bright as a dollar … smart as a whip,” that “his mind is like a steel trap.”

  His ability to plan and execute schemes to provide money for himself, to escape legal consequences, and to give, when desirable, the impression that he is, in the ordinary sense, mentally deranged, could be matched by few, if any, people whom I have known. In such thinking he not only shows objective ingenuity but also remarkable knowledge of other people and their reactions (of psychology in the popular sense) at certain levels or, rather in certain modes of personality reaction. He stands out for the swiftness and accuracy of his thinking at solving puzzles and at playing checkers. At any sort of contest based on a matching of wits, he is unlikely to come off second best.

  To consider his intelligence (or should one say wisdom?) from another viewpoint, from that of the ordinary man’s idea of what is good sense about working out a successful plan of life on a long-term basis, only the story of his career can speak adequately. Be it noted that the result of his conduct brings trouble not only to others but almost as regularly to himself.

  To take still another point of view and consider him on a basis of those values somewhat vaguely implied by “intellectuality,” “culture,” or, in everyday speech, by “depth of mind,” we find an appalling deficiency. These concepts in which meaning or emotional significance are considered along with the mechanically rational, if applied to this man, measure him as very small, or very defective. He appears not only ignorant in such modes of function but stupid as well. He is unfamiliar with the primary facts or data of what might be called personal values and is altogether incapable of understanding such matters. It is impossible for him to take even a slight interest in the tragedy or joy or the striving of humanity as presented in serious literature or art. He is also indifferent to all these matters in life itself. Beauty and ugliness, except in a very superficial sense, goodness, evil, love, horror, and humor have no actual meaning, no power to move him.

  He is, furthermore, lacking in the ability to see that others are moved. It is as though he were colorblind, despite his sharp intelligence, to this aspect of human existence. It cannot be explained to him because there is nothing in his orbit of awareness that can bridge the gap with comparison. He can repeat the words and say glibly that he understands, and there is no way for him to realize that he does not understand.

  I believe that this man has sufficient intelligence, in the ordinary sense, to acquire what often passes for learning in such fields as literature and philosophy. If he had more stability and persistence he could easily earn a Ph.D. or an M.D. degree from the average university in this country. If he had this stability and became a
doctor of philosophy in literature, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Joseph Conrad or of Thomas Hardy would still have no power to move him. He would remember facts and he could learn to manipulate facts and even to devise rationalizations in such a field with skill comparable to that with which he now outthinks an opponent at checkers. If, for the sake of theory and speculation, such changes were granted to him, my contention that he would still be without this sort of understanding is, of course, impossible to prove. It is maintained, however, that this would be clear to all observers who have real interest in such aspects of life, however diverse might be their own formulated opinions on what is good, bad, true, or beautiful about art or about living.

  But let us abandon speculation and return to the patient’s conduct. He talked at length of his ability as a fencer, maintaining that he was the best swordsman, or one of the best, at Heidelberg during his student days and was also well known and feared in Vienna. He spoke of the championship he had won at boxing while in the army, boasting often of a belt which he still possessed symbolizing this achievement. On hearing that I had had a slight experience in amateur boxing, he offered to demonstrate his skill and to teach me some points. Ostentatiously he insisted that I stand up and, pulling his punches, went through a number of sequences. He did this several times, always choosing a place on the ward where he could be observed by a large group of patients and attendants. He gave every indication of being a practiced boxer. This is borne out also by army records which indicate that he won some small prize as champion of his battalion or regiment.

  Even before his presentation at the staff meeting, he again became dissatisfied, making complaints against the nurses and attendants, demanding special foods and privileges, bullying other patients, and inciting them to make trouble. At staff meeting the diagnosis of psychopathic personality was reaffirmed.